


Looking for the Light

by Papapaldi



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:42:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25244848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi
Summary: Ellie, Dina, and Tommy are left wounded and broken, their journey back to Jackson is long and arduous, and no matter how hard Ellie tries, she can't keep Abby from her mind.Abby and Lev have set sail from Seattle and are journeying south towards Santa Barbara. Abby sees a hopeful future ahead, but struggles with the violence of her past, and the loss of her friends.Both women are yet to face the greatest trials and choices of their lives, and will meet once more before they can find the purpose and self-forgiveness they crave.
Relationships: Abby & Lev (The Last of Us), Dina/Ellie (The Last of Us), Ellie & Tommy (The Last of Us)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 51





	Looking for the Light

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not too sure where this fic is going, but I'm planning to bridge a bit of the gap between Seattle and Santa Barbara, and continue into post-epilogue territory  
> Maybe you guys have suggestions :)

**Ellie – Seattle**

_ The sound of your voice struck _

_ A dissonance through my core, sharp _

_ Like a blade against your throat, stomach, face, cutting around inside, _

_ I’ve seen it in my dreams, _

_ They don’t come true, _

_ And you  _

_ Won this round you fucking bitch, _

_ I deserve this, every bruise, every drop – _

_ But I’ll pay you back for every one, _

_ I’ll see this through until it’s done. _

The sound of her footsteps make Ellie’s ears ring – each thud of the resounding stage floor thunderous through her chest. One of her ribs is broken. The raw, mashed flesh at her throat still throbs as if Abby’s hands were still wrapped around it, squeezing out her life. 

“Dina,” she croaks out, between the blood gargling in the back of her throat; too hot, too sharp. She coughs, splutters, rolls onto her side. “Dina.” It takes all her effort just to choke out her name. Her girlfriend lies slumped a few metres away, sunset orange shirt soaked through with blood – red spreading at a worrying pace from an arrow point protruding from her chest. She’s pale, clammy, bruised purple in the face; fading. “Dina –” her voice catches on the final sound, and she claws herself towards her, raising jagged weight on quivering arms, a silted crawl. 

Coming to rest beside Dina, Ellie slowly works her shirt from her shoulders. Taking her switchblade from her pocket, she cuts the blue fabric into ragged bandage strips. “I got you, babe, you’ll be okay,” Ellie props Dina up against her where she kneels. She’s barely conscious, and her dark eyes roll behind half-closed lids, mouth open, lips moving as if she’s trying to say something. Ellie wraps the bandages tight around each end of the arrow, pressing the fabric hard against the mangled flesh beneath. “Hold that there, okay? I’m going to get some proper bandages, get that thing out.”

“Ellie,” she whispers. Her hands are feeble as they reach up, blue-tipped fingers brushing against Ellie’s own, the blood under her nails, weeping knuckles, bruised skin. 

“I’m gonna be right back.” Painfully, she wrenches herself to her feet, one joint at a time, each one grinding in protest, stubborn as metal. She limps and shudders towards the stairs, running through the last few minutes in her mind, play-by-play. She was right there – Abby, though her face was different to the one she’d seen in her head, pressed pore by pore into her memory. The hate had twisted her up, cast her rage-stitched face in the pallor of darkening snow, blood flecks across her cheeks. Her image crystalised in that state, and to see it moving in real time, speaking, had been strange. Uncanny. Ellie finally had her cornered – wounded animal crouched in the shadows, defenceless, and still Ellie had let her win. Where could she have swung her axe, placed a trap, focused her ear? So many split second mistakes, and now she was gone. Part of her wants to limp out of this place into the calming storm outside, and face her. She would die, but it would be an end to it, some sort of conclusion. Dina needs her, so she doesn’t.

A strangled cry echoes, muffled and animalistic, from the upper level. For a moment her muscles seize up as she pictures a runner. She speeds up her climb as much as she can, hands pressed against the wall, scrabbling against the bricks. Struggling over the final step, nausea punches deep in her gut at the site of Jesse slumped heavy against the old carpet. Her insides broil, gut threatens to retch. Tommy is still moving. He cries out again, choking against the blood in his mouth – it’s pouring from a hole scraped deep in the side of his head. 

“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” she stumbles over to him. An unsteady leg kicks out against Jesse’s body, stiff and cold. “Tommy,” she collapses onto her knees beside him. He’s half raised up, quivering hands pressed up against his head. More than a graze, less than a point-blank shot. “Fuck,” she whispers again, “Tommy move your hand.”

Ellie grabs his hand and pulls it away from the damage. His speech is slurred, barely a gravely whisper, one eye staring madly and the other obscured by gore and hair matted dark red. “Where’s that fucking bitch, where is she –”

“Tommy, it’s me, just hold still a second.” He tries to move, to drag himself to his feet, but she holds him down. It doesn’t take much. “Just stay still, I’ll get some bandages, painkillers, just stay still.” The sight of him lying there, head bashed in, the purple swelling bruised flesh to black red popped open ripped torn – she catches herself doubled over against the coil-tight twist in her chest, and stumbles for the stage. She can’t lose Tommy too. Rifling through his bag, she finds his medical supplies – alcohol, bandages, stitches, painkillers – she piles it all into her arms. She goes to Tommy first, and hopes it won’t cost Dina her life. 

She bandages his head with trembling hands. The bullet shell lies deformed on the carpet some distance away, and she’s thankful that it hasn’t lodged itself anywhere inside him. Dabbing the blood away from the source, she can see that the bullet went through the side of his head, maybe grazed the skull but didn’t puncture it, she thinks. She hopes. Ellie decides that she’ll tackle disinfecting it later once the bleeding has stopped, and gives him a dose of pills, a gulpful of water. He loses consciousness again, but she’s confident he’ll live – for now, anyway. As for the arrow in his leg, it’s lodged fairly shallow, and has made a long, messy gnash on entry, plenty of room to tease out the broadhead without getting it stuck. She bandages up the entry wound but leaves the arrow in for now, letting the blood clot thick and black at the surface. 

She goes back for Dina, running on adrenaline alone. It blocks out the pain, her exhaustion. Anger fuels her too, and she holds Abby’s face in her mind, contorted in rage, dashed with rain, twisted up behind her pistol grip, remorseless. 

Luckily for Dina, the arrow pierced all the way through the flesh of her shoulder, no bones to navigate around, no organs to puncture. Once the blood around the wound is clotted, she saws off the broadhead with her switchblade, careful to keep the cut clean of shards and splinters. Ellie sits Dina up against her, one hand steadying her shoulders, the other around the arrow in her back. “I’m gonna pull this out, okay babe. Ready?” Dina whimpers. She’s shivering, and her skin is paler and clammier than ever. “One, two, three,” she grimaces on the final word, and wrenches the arrow free. She does it as quickly as she can while keeping its path straight, attempting to leave the mangled flesh within undisturbed. The sound it makes as it comes out is sickening, and somehow worse coming from Dina’s body than from her own. It squelches, and cracks the clotted seal on its way out. Again, the blood comes freely, and Ellie picks splinters from around the entry wound. She rips Dina’s shirt away from the hole torn in it, and sticks both ends of the wound down with thick gauze pads, wrapping layers of bandaging from under her armpit, all the way around her chest. All the while she keeps herself talking, mutters through the steps, curses under her breath. She feels like she’s fourteen again, left alone and clueless to watch the one she loves suffer through pain.  _ You’ve gotta tell me what to do – _ but there’s no one left. 

She’s caught between the two of them – Tommy and Dina – dashing back and forth, up and down the stairs wrapped up in pain of her own; aching and what she suspects are dislocated bones. She doesn’t have time to check. Along the path is Jesse, and how many times she passes him she can’t be sure. He only ever came here to Seattle because of her, Dina too. It should have been just her and Tommy, and if either of them were to die it should have been her. She’s been running on borrowed time for four years, borrowed from the world, at its expense. 

She doesn’t allow herself to collapse into exhaustion until both of them are on the right side of the abyss, bandaged and blood-dried, doped but conscious. She takes a half dose for herself, and falls asleep beside Dina on the floor.

She dreams of a never ending basement stairwell, pounding against the floor that echoes up through the thin plaster walls, pressing in, and his cries, screaming her name over and over. She never makes it to the bottom.

“Ellie,” there’s a grip on her shoulder, ice-cold, and she starts in alarm. Her breathing comes fast and shallow, suffocating – “Ellie, it’s just me, look, it’s me,” Dina’s hand is on her arm, her face looming over. The bags beneath her eyes are worse, and her cheeks are pinched and white. 

“Dina,” she pants. Her voice is hoarse and low, “you should be resting. Don’t move your shoulder.” Dina holds her pierced arm still by her side, hanging like dead weight. The muscles are ravaged, but they’ll heal. 

“I know, fucking everything hurts. You did a good job patching me up. Pretty terrible job on yourself though.” She indicates the cuts and bruises adorning every patch of Ellie’s skin, the tender, aching cartilage where her nose is broken, and the blood beneath it. Her elbow is bent at an off-angle, hand clutching her chest where her rib is cracked. 

“I didn’t have time for myself.”

She smiles in a soft, knowing way. “Of course you didn’t.” Dina sighs, grimacing, and reaches a hand up to where her wound has been bandaged. “Are the others dead?” There’s an edge of desperate hope in her voice. 

“Tommy was alive when I went to sleep. Bullet through the side of his head, missed his skull.”

“And Jesse?”

Ellie sighs deeply and tears herself away from Dina’s wide-eyed gaze. Her dark eyes are already resigned to the truth in the way they glisten deep red beneath the stage lights, and Ellie’s silence is answer enough. 

“Fuck,” Dina whispers, “Jesse.” 

“I’m sorry –”

“You don’t need to apologise.”

“Of course I need to fucking apologise!” her outburst rakes against her throat, straining the muscles that Abby squeezed tight, and left bruised. “I left my map in the fucking aquarium, that’s how they found us. By the time I realised it was too late – and if I’d just listened to Jesse and gone with him to the marina to get Tommy then none of this would’ve happened, we could’ve been on the way back to Jackson already, and now –”

“Now it’s done,” she says, in that forceful, final way of hers. Despite the softness and weakness of her voice, it pulls the words right out of Ellie’s mouth, and her hand reaching across, tightening its grip on Ellie’s wrist, carves her chest empty too. Ellie edges her fingers through Dina’s and forces through a deep, quivering breath. “Now it’s done and there’s no point beating yourself up over what you did, even if it was wrong.”

“It was,” she mutters.

“Yeah, you know what, it fucking was,” but there’s no anger in her voice, not a shred of contempt. Ellie knows she doesn’t deserve it. “But I understand. You came here to make her pay, and I know you, Ellie, you’re so fucking stubborn, of course you were going to see that through.”

“Dina, she was pregnant – that woman, Mel –”

“You said she jumped you –”

“It doesn’t change it.”

“But it’s over now, yeah? We’re done. We can go home.”

“Yeah. Yeah we’re getting you back to Jackson, I’m sorry I put you through all this.”

“Please,” she smirks, “you couldn’t have stopped me coming along if you tried.” 

Ellie smiles, and winces as the movement strains her face, sets her nose throbbing anew. 

“I’ll patch you up, where are those supplies –”

“You need to rest.”

“Well so do you!”

“I should check on Tommy first.”

“Okay, fine,” she concedes. She sits upright gingerly, and her hand creeps its way to her stomach as she closes her eyes, gulps deeply. “Just let me take a look at you after that, okay?”

“Yeah, deal,” Ellie grunts, getting to her feet. 

When she walks out into the foyer, she sees Tommy sitting where she left him, propped up on one shoulder. His unbandaged eye is bloodshot, the tissue around it swollen. He’s staring over at Jesse. 

“Hi Tommy,” she says. The sound seems to take a moment to reach him, and his gaze fixes on her laboriously slow. 

“Hey Ellie.” 

“How are you feeling?”

“Well, I’ve definitely been better,” he says darkly, looking down at the once-mustard carpet soaked through to a paling red. “Please tell me you put that bitch down.” 

Ellie swallows – her throat still raw and dry. Still, she can feel the pressure of Abby’s hands around her neck. “No, she, err, she got away.” 

“Goddamnit.”

“I’m sorry –”

“No, Ellie, it ain’t your fault.”

“Uh, it sort of fucking is –”

“What’s important,” he cuts across her, and winces at the strain of raising his voice. “What’s important is that you’re alive, and as much as I wish it were me lying there instead of Jesse,” he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath in, “I am too. And what about Dina, she safe?”

“Yeah, she’ll be okay.”

“Good. So let’s get going.” 

“You sure you’ll be okay to set out now?” 

“Don’t you worry about me, now.”

“You’re wired up on pain meds, you’re only going to cause more damage if you start moving.”

“And what if they send more people after us? Sure Abby and that fucking kid got away, but what if they come back with more? We need to get gone.” 

Ellie looks down at her shoes, scuffing them against the carpet. She’s ashamed, she realises – deeply. She feels like she’s confessing, like a kid that’s done wrong. “She let us go.”

“She what?”

“She had me, and Dina, and she let us go. She didn’t just escape, she won. She won’t be coming back here.” 

Tommy takes a moment to consider this, and seems just as unable to fathom it as Ellie is. “Well that’s her problem. If she thinks this is gonna make right what she did to Joel –”

“I know it doesn’t, alright, all I’m saying is just,” she realises she had raised her voice, jumped to the defensive. She sighs and lowers her voice again, “just take a fucking break, okay?”

“Yes Ma’am.” 

“Ugh,” she rolls her eyes, but grins all the same, “don’t start that shit, just take it easy. I mean, you got shot in the head, you’ve earned a rest.” 

She gives Tommy another dose of painkillers and tries to help him stand. It doesn’t go too well, almost instantly he starts getting dizzy and disorientated, and the muscles in his right leg are too banged up for him to put weight on them yet. 

“Just stay out here for a sec. I’m gonna get Dina backstage, I’ll come back for you, then we can reassess our route, get patched up, work out where to go from here.” 

He grunts, and screws up his face in pain. “You got it.” 

After helping Dina up to the room backstage, and helping Tommy do the same in a slow, stilted walk, stopping every few metres to rest on the theatre seats, they’re finally together. Jesse’s body lay in the foyer, left but unforgotten. In fact, every one of their minds dwell upon it, wondering if they should try and move him, bury him, do  _ something.  _ The unfortunate truth is that none of them are up to the task. Jesse belongs in Jackson – he’s lived there most of his life, he was always a leader, looked up to by everyone. It feels wrong to leave him rotting in this shithole of a city. If he were here, he’d be telling them all to rest up and get their asses out of Seattle, but still, it doesn’t sit right with Ellie and she sits there, licking her wounds, tracing out a map across Idaho. None of what’s happened over the past few days sits right – all the killing… In Jackson it was easy to forget what it felt like, and this had been different from what she’d done before, killing to survive, killing by necessity. She didn’t need to come here. She came here hunting, and yet Ellie knows she couldn’t have done anything less. If she had just sat back in Jackson, if she hadn’t suffered, and made them suffer in return, she would have been letting Joel down. Sure, if he were alive he would have told her to stay safe, but she knows how fiercely he loved her, and she knows, deeply, painfully, how fiercely he’s protected her, the lengths he’s gone to. Doing this is her proof that she felt the same, despite her coldness – it’s her thanks and her penance. In his own, twisted way, he saved her life. In her own, twisted way, she’s saying thank you. 

Ellie lets Dina stitch up the deepest of her cuts, clean her grazes, pick out the splinters from the shattered backstage floorboards. She sets her nose, bandages her face, and mops the blood from her lip, her knuckles. She can’t stop shaking. As Ellie cleans the blood from her hands, rinses her mouth, her teeth, the last remnants of Abby are gone from her. She feels like a dog – and she’s rabid as one – losing the scent. How far away is Abby now? She has to remind herself that it doesn’t matter anymore. 

Their food will last them a while, but not forever. They should get moving by the next day, but from their states, she knows how slow it will be. On foot, injured. They won’t be able to pick fights with hordes or hunters – they’ll stick to the overgrown, rural paths. It’s going to be many months before they see Jackson again, before Dina can get the help she needs – and it was all for nothing, because Abby gets to live. Tommy says they sent their message, that these WLFs won’t be bothering Jackson again, and she really hopes he’s right. She still hasn’t told Dina the real reason they came after Joel. She doesn’t think she will. It’s her secret now, too. Keeping it is part of her thanks. 

**Abby – Jackson**

The first strike sent electricity through her veins. It entered him, the spark, and drew out a scream rich with pain. 

He was like a nightmare made real, and tied down at her feet. The man from her dreams, who stood over the corpse of her father with bloodied hands and a shadowed, featureless face twisted up in malice. She remembers walking through the hospital that night, gun held tight in quivering, whitening hands, sweating – the trembling footsteps. There were bodies up against the walls. Their heads were bashed in, bullets through their skulls, arms snapped and necks broken. It would have been Owen if he was posted that night. Some of them were burned to a crisp. When she held the club, she did it for them. His name was Joel Miller, and she used to repeat that name to herself like a charm, or a curse, and imagine the feeling of him grovelling at her feet, hurting as much as he hurt the world, hurt her. In waking, every comrade they lost to the infection – every broken mask, every bite, scratch, every tear – she thought of him. She thought of the fact that a vaccine could’ve made its way from Utah to Washington in all that time or less, and could’ve saved them. She thought about the never ending turf war between the WLF and the Seraphites – if a vaccine had been distributed, would that war have come to an end? Would an end to the ‘demons’ and their infection have ended their conquest? Could the world have, in time, made its way back to the place her father always told her about? She counted every one of those lives against his name – Joel Miller – and knew that he deserved death a thousand times over, and worse. When the time finally came, his screams were like a drug, and the prospect of its taste had fuelled her all these years as she built herself, broke herself, pushed herself to the very edge. She killed, mauled, tortured, and with every strike she thought of him, and tried to forget. She knew that if her father could see what she had become, he would be disgusted, and tried to forget. 

The second strike felt just as good. Behind her, she heard Mel gasp as the blood spurted out, and that felt good too. 

She used the club to bash every part of him. She let Manny have a turn. His father was a soldier, and Joel had killed him too. Abby ran through words she’d learnt by heart, the script she’d been writing out in her mind before she fell asleep for years. She carved him up, broke his bones, bashed in his head until the skull cracked and each hit squelched against the tissue beneath. 

The strikes after that didn’t give her the same thrill. Once the brains were bashed in, the screams and shouts no longer sounded human. Animalistic moans, loud beyond belief, rattling, wet. She wondered if he even knew where he was anymore, if he could remember anything besides what he was feeling now, the periodic swing, hit, and one more breath pushed out. His eyes couldn’t see beyond the blacked swell of his lids, the teeth were shattered, his spine snapped. No matter how many times she heard him cry out, each sickening crunch, it never felt like enough. It never would be, because of what he did. Manny said that people like him, the smugglers, the backwater thugs, they wanted the world broken just the way it was. Any hope to save it was against their best interests. They couldn’t cope within an ordered world because they thrived in chaos. Even if he did do it all to save the girl, like Owen thought, it didn’t change what he’d done, what he deserved. Ends and means all wrapped up – he’d still stuck a scalpel in her father’s throat, a bullet in Marlene’s head. He’d still destroyed her life, the lives of all her friends, and snuffed out the light, and  _ her  _ light, her belief. 

The final strike felt like giving up, and the cries of the girl pressed against the cold stone floor barely touched her, despite their ringing familiarity. The final strike meant that it was over, this was it. She had nothing left to strive for. What was the point of carving through Scars, building herself up, staying in Isaac’s good books, if there was no favour to ask, no end goal to reach? This was the man who cost them the world, and he was dead, but the world still wallowed, and broke further, just as black and bloodied and brain-dead as the corpse at her feet. After it all, the nightmares didn’t even stop. 

**Abby – Seattle**

Abby dreams of her father. That’s unremarkable in itself – she’s dreamt of her father nearly every night for almost five years, but she never dreams of him alive – always pierced through the neck, the chest, bleeding freely upon the polished white floors. Tonight, there’s no hospital. It’s a tracking lesson – traipsing through the old zoo grounds, following tracks. An amalgamation of memories. She lets his advice wash over her without substance and clings to the sound of his voice. 

When she wakes, it takes a few moments for the texture of the earth to leave her fingertips, and the smell of the forest and the mould of old stone to fade. She’s left with the rocking of the boat on the dawn-calm shallows, the storm of the night and the slow winding winds of the following day finally passed. When Lev isn’t by her side on the camp bed, a momentary thrill of panic shoots through her. Abby sits up with a sharp jerk, only to hit her head against the low-hanging deck above. 

“Fuck,” she strains, putting a hand to her head. It isn’t only her head that’s throbbing, the renewed brash of pain seems to jump-start her nerves, and suddenly every cut, graze, and bruise makes its mark known in a whirl of sharp stings and deep aches. She really was lucky to make it out of there alive. The girl, Ellie, as she’d heard her called, wasn’t the sort to give in, or fight pretty. She was certainly stronger than she looked. She wonders if it was Ellie who put a bullet in Owen, or a knife through Mel’s throat. Back in Jackson, it would have saved her a whole lot of heartache if they had just killed Ellie and Tommy there and then, tied off those deathly-sharp loose ends. Instead, she saved her own conscience, and saved herself a world of guilt atop a load already spilling from her grasp – but it might have saved her friends, and saved every other soldier they carved through along their path to them. In a way, she feels their blood stain her hands too, because she knows just how ruthlessly revenge will shape you, down to an arrowpoint steered towards one goal, at any cost. Even now, thinking of the attack she would have led against the Seraphites, and the bodies on both sides she left in her path to save one life; she knows that revenge isn’t the only motivator that will shave you down to bitter-blade steel, but love, too. 

“Lev?” she calls, and hopes to the god she doesn’t believe in that he hasn’t jumped overboard and swam away. Maybe he decided a wolf wasn’t worth sticking with after all; and not just a wolf, a monster. 

“Up here,” his voice answers, muffled through the ceiling. Abby had driven them far enough from the coast that they wouldn’t be spotted, even though she knew that both wolves and scars alike would still be nursing their wounds, assessing the damage, taking prisoners, beginning a whole new era of pain. They wouldn’t have time for two deserters. Abby hadn’t seen any of them in the time it took them to return to the marina from the theatre near downtown, and it had taken them a fair while longer than the trip there, with Abby’s wounds and their exhaustion. They had been back by the afternoon, set off by sunset, passed out by nightfall. 

Abby pokes her head out through the cabin doors to meet a fresh, salty taste, only slightly tainted by the smoke and ashes blown downwind from the Seraphite’s island. Lev is sitting on the highest point of the ship, knees tucked under his chin. Abby’s jacket is wrapped over his shoulders, and he stares out towards the broken Seattle skyline, and the torrent of dark smoke that hangs in a far-off cloud, swept past the island he once called home. It’s early, and the sun has barely risen, the sky still tinged midnight blue in the aftermath of night. 

“How are you feeling, kid?”

He smiles weakly, turning around to look her way. “I’m okay

“I thought you took off or something.” She makes her way to the front of the ship, leaning against the railing, staring out at the vast, empty waters ahead. 

“I just couldn’t sleep. I had a bad dream.”

“I’ll bet. 

“ _ And _ you kept stealing all the covers.”

“Hey, it takes a lot of fabric to cover these guns.” 

“Guns?”

“You know,” she flexes her arms, tapping her bicep, “muscles.”

“Oh,” he grinned, “I guess it does.”

“You really should get some sleep though. I’ll keep on driving the boat, start making our way south.”

“You could teach me how to drive it, so we can keep going while you sleep.”

“To be honest, kid, I barely know how to drive it myself. That was always Owen’s bag, I’m just working it out as I go along.”

“How is a boat a bag?”

“It’s his thing, like he’s good at it and I’m not.”

“Right.” He pauses, and she hears him jump down from his perch, and come to stand beside her against the railings. “Why do you say so much stuff that doesn’t mean what it sounds like it should?”

She smiles. “Guess that’s just another sin of the old world.”

He snorts out a laugh, “okay.” Lev looks down at his arms, the cuts dashed across them have dried to dark, crusted lines, the skin surrounding them red and tender. He runs a hand across them, letting Abby’s jacket hang from his slumped shoulders. 

“Are you doing okay?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be. You can tell me the truth. I’m definitely not doing okay, if that makes you feel any better.” 

He looks up at her and smiles ruefully. “Guess I’m not. I should never have gone back to the Island.” 

“You wanted to save your Mom, you can’t have known she would –”

“Yes, I could. Yara told me and I didn’t want to believe her, but I knew she was right. Now they’re both dead,” his voice catches in his throat, and Abby can see tears brimming in his eyes. He wipes them away hurriedly and steadies his breath. “I should have just run away, and they’d both still be alive.”

“And you’d be dead.” Abby puts a hand on his shoulder. “Yara was a warrior, chances are the wolves would’ve killed her in the assult. Loss is around every corner, right? This world is shit, sometimes we try to save the people we love, or do something good, and it all goes wrong.” She thinks of Owen, and Mel, and Manny. Judging by their map and their creepy hideout, those fuckers from Jackson had gone through Jordan, Leah, Nora, and who knew who else. She’d dragged them all out to Jackson and signed their death sentence in her attempt to enact justice. That should have been the end of it all. 

“These Fireflies – do you think they’re still trying to find a cure?”

“A vaccine – you can’t cure the Cordyceps, they were just going to stop new people getting infected – and no. No there’s no more Doctors, there’s no one left who knows how.” She told Lev a condensed version of her story on the way to and from the theatre. He’d been curious, of course, about who would’ve done such a thing to her friends. 

“Maybe there are. Maybe they came from far away.”

She grinned, “you’re sounding like Owen. Besides, there might not even be Fireflies in Santa Barbara, they’re just rumors.”

“The prophet’s scripture says there’s no cure because it’s caused by something purely evil. Trying to cure it is futile, only by turning away from the past can we forge a new path.” 

“Well, you might be right about that.”

Lev gazes off towards the gathering smoke. “Who do you think won the fight?” 

“To be honest, I don’t think anyone can win a fight like that. I mean you saw it, if was a fucking shitshow.”

“Shit show?”

“A mess, it was terrible. Anyway, Isaac’s dead, so there’ll be higher ups trying to wedge themselves into power – trouble is Isaac never really had a second in command, no one he was close to, who he shared secrets with. It’s going to be messy. The wolves were retreating, the island was burning. I think this war is gonna keep going on forever, and I’m glad I got out before it killed me.” 

“My friends are still there. They’re so devout – they won’t stop fighting, no matter what happens.”

“You need to think about yourself now.”

  
  


“I know. Yara said the same. We’re not supposed to be selfish”

“Look, for a long time, I followed all their rules. The wolves have a different sort, but they’ve got them. They’ve got their own brand of doctrine too, and I – I don’t like what they made me, what I let myself become. You can’t let them shape you, change you.” She sighs out into the open air, letting the cloud of her breath sail out into the dawning sky. Behind them, Seattle is a faded, murky grey, the ferris wheel and the marina distant shapes carved out thin and dark against the pale sky. “And I want to say thanks, you know, for stopping me, and stopping me from being that.” 

_ Red lights blaring across her back, cuts bleeding freely across her arms, freshly sliced, and a body in her arms, hair pulled tight through her fingers and a knife poised to open her throat. She was enthralled, in that moment, taken over by that electric feeling of the first strike – the woman lying on the ground before her, spitting blood and heaving her battered chest, Abby wanted to make her suffer. The last remnants of her life before Seattle, her true life, her true self, had been taken from her – and Owen. She loved him, and hated herself for loving him, and would probably always love him and her head was wrapped in the guilt, the shame, the rage – and Lev pulled her back. His eyes, like a glimmer of conscience within her, they were her father’s eyes, and they implored her;  _ do no harm. 

Lev takes a moment to speak, again running his palms up and down the carved skin of his forearms. “Letting them go, after what they did – I think that was the strongest thing you could have done,” he gazes up at her, and in that moment she knows that everything she’s done to get them both here was worth it. All the bodies she carved through, the harsh betrayal of everything she’s come to know, everything she’s worked for these past four years, it was all worth it. She thinks she’s been looking for a reason to escape for a long time – she thought she didn’t deserve a chance like that. She thought that the killing, the routine, was all she was good for anymore. “You’re strong, Abby.”

She smirks to hide the sincerity in the warmth spreading through her. “Yeah I am, ‘cos of these guns,” she flexes again, at which Lev scoffs and turns again towards the vast open sea. “True strength, right here.” 

Lev yawns, and tries unsuccessfully to stifle it. 

“You get some sleep now, okay? You can have the covers all to yourself.”

“Okay,” he nods, pushing back from the railing and shuffling his way past her to the cabin doors. He’s cautious moving about on the boat, unsteady on his feet. The way he stares wide-eyed at the sublimity surrounding – the wide, endless waters, there’s a dash of fear in his eyes not unlike the spell of vertigo she knows so well. They’re similar, in a way; heights and the ocean. An abyssal depth, fathomless space – an unknown, in sinking and falling. 

“And kid,” she says, turning as he looks back, head poking out above the entrance to the cabin below, “if you have any more bad dreams, just let me know, okay? I’ve got a few good strategies for calming yourself down, I used to have nightmares all the time.” 

“Okay, thanks. I will.” He ducks down into the cabin and out of sight. 

After all his time alone, all the things he’s repressed, the buried fears, she hopes that he can learn to share some of that pain, and that perhaps she can too. She heads to the back of the boat and starts up the engines, leaving Seattle far behind in the smoking dawn. 


End file.
